Heroes and Castles

Tower defense games were among the first to stand out on the App Store, due to their touch-friendly controls and short, wave-based levels. But until now, the genre hasn’t evolved much. Last year’s Fieldrunners 2 is polished and varied, but it’s fundamentally the same game as 2008‘s Besiegement. Heroes and Castles, on the other hand, upturns the tower defense genre and makes it feel much more immediate and exciting.

Instead of watching over your castle from a bird’s eye view, in Heroes and Castles you are standing right there on the front lines. Hordes of evil enemies, like skeleton warriors, mummies, and goblin bomb-throwers will swarm your castle walls, seeking to destroy them and attack the keep inside. You have to run up to them and fight back, all while ordering battlefield reinforcements and armaments for the walls.

Attack, my minions!

This groundbreaking combination of third-person action and strategic resource management is simply outstanding. At any given moment, you’ll have to order the construction of gold mines to generate more revenue, archers to patrol the wall, pitchfork-wielding peons to roam the battlefield, and reinforced barriers to slow the enemy’s assault. And those are just the early upgrades– later in the game, you’ll be able to build a battle academy, ballistas, generals, giants, and dwarven sharpshooters.

You can never just sit back and let your peons do all the work, nor can you act as the lone defender. It’s in finding a careful balance between immediate action and strategic planning that Heroes and Castles reveals its substantial depth.

Pike the football.

The mechanics of Heroes and Castles are also incredibly sound. Your hero moves freely around the battlefield with basic touch controls. Your archers, peons, and other support units have decent AI, and over time, you can upgrade them to make them faster, stronger, and more accurate.

Heroes and Castles offers three different playable characters– a knight, paladin, and engineer– and there’s a reward for beating all 20 levels with each character. However, the castle you defend barely changes, except for some slight weather effects, and it would have been nice to fight in different locations. What does improve the variety is an endless, online co-op mode through Game Center. Additional modes, like versus multiplayer, are teased on the menu screens for a later update.

Heroes and Castles captures the immediacy of battle in a way that few tower defense games can. It’s more like the console series Dynasty Warriors, or the Helm’s Deep battle in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, than your typical App Store adventure. When the war horn sounds, your defenses fall, and a swarm of skeleton warriors rushes in to destroy your keep, Heroes & Castles is a pulse-pounding experience that is practically unmatched.

Instead of a post-holiday lull, this January has been a surprisingly strong month for new iOS games. Out of several new Must Have games, one action-strategy game stands out, like a siege tower on a battlefield full of orcs and skeleton warriors. Our Game of the Month for January 2013 is Heroes and Castles, by Foursaken Media.

Heroes and Castles is a combination of third-person action and tower defense-style strategy. You have to control both a champion on the battlefield and the castle’s defenses. After constructing gold mines and other support buildings, you’ll be able to summon powerful allies, like pikemen, riflemen, and giants. As the forces of evil send waves of villains to attack your walls and units, you’ll have to carefully balance your own hand-to-hand combat with the overall strength of your fortress.

Between levels, Heroes and Castles lets you power up each individual unit or defense, and you can add new skills to your warrior’s arsenal. While the game originally launched with three heroes, a recent update lets you unlock two more, for even more variety. If the extensive single-player campaign wasn’t enough, there’s also online co-op multiplayer, plus a recently-added, drastically different siege mode that lets you fight from the evil monsters’ point of view. Heroes and Castles is a fully-featured, excitingly original action game, and it’s a big step forward for one of our favorite indie iOS developers.

Another hero of the App Store this month is Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, a port of the handheld and downloadable console title from Ubisoft and Capy Games. In it, you take control of five different fantasy armies to save the world from demons. The gameplay is a terrific mix of RPG, strategy, and Match-3, and there’s enough content to keep you busy for many hours. Better yet, once you’ve cut your teeth on the single-player campaign, you can dive into the multiplayer and battle against friends or strangers over Game Center. A few control annoyances aside, Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is the complete package.

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The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

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